• Question: did you ever consider becomng a neurosurgeon when you where younger? i hope to become one when im older, but what would you say is the most exciting thing i can hopefully look forward to doing whilst working with brains?

    Asked by jacobj to Hannah on 26 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Hannah Brotherton

      Hannah Brotherton answered on 26 Jun 2013:


      Hi jacobj,
      absolutely!!!! I even applied to do medicine, but I turned it down.
      This is because I wanted to do research first. I still have a chance to be a surgeon, because I work in a clinical setting with patients and people.

      So the best thing about the brain – how complex it is, how it heals itself, how you can live with half of it damaged, how it makes us who we are.
      I have dissected a brain ( a lovely person donated it to science) and it is the most strangest thing you will ever see.
      You cannot imagine electricity running through it, because it just looks like any other organ.
      So if you do neuroscience in university (like me :D), you will get to dissect a brain, specialize in an area like vision or hearing or memory and you will get to do your own research.

      Becoming a neurosurgeon is even more exciting. Have you watched those programmes where they are performing surgery on awake patients when when they touch on part of the brain and make the patient speak – their speech is affected. We can do this because the brain can’t feel pain.

      So you have so much more exciting things to do and experience in uni compared to someone who does maths lol. You sound like you really want this!!!!! Protect this dream and become a neurosurgeon.

      So how can you become one???
      Best thing to do is go to medical school but you can do another degree a swell at the same time, so you could do neuroscience. Sometimes Doctors will even do research like a PhD – so you could do a PhD as well as being a doctor.

      It is going to be a lot of work, but the brain is everything we are, who we are and without it we wouldn’t exist.

      So what is the favorite part of the brain
      I like the frontal cortex (the front part) because this is where our personalities are created

      😀

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